Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: April 10, 2009
Tags : cell phones, phone bill, texting, verizon
Texting has become something of our next social disease but in most cases doesn’t much more damage that give you sore thumbs especially if you are in the habit of sending out 10,000 text messages. The real problem is when you suddenly find yourself with a hefty bill at the end of the month as Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen did recently.
It turns out their daughter, Dena Christoffersen, got a little over active at school with her texting habit on a phone that her parents had thought the texting had been disabled. Well it turns out that it wasn’t and Verizon was good enough to send them a bill for $4,756.25.
Not only that but during this time Dena’s grades went from As and Bs to solid Fs right across the board. Combine the two things together and Gregg Christoffersen did the only thing a father could do – he took a hammer to the phone. Dena has also been grounded until the end of the school years, but since she has lost her phone her grades have made a marked recovery.
On the money part of it Verizon was good enough to take the ax to the bill and reduce it down to a more reasonable level.
[via 9NEWS.com]
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Apr 10, 2009
This is why it's nice to have the “unlimited texting” plan on Verizon.
I don't do a whole lot, but it's nice to not have to worry about going over, and it's something like $20/mth.
Maybe it's not the daughter that's the stupid one in this story…
–Kyle
May 4, 2009
I can't begin to imagine what it was like for the parents to get a $5K phone bill, especially if they thought that they had a texting plan that, while not unlimited, was at least comprehensive. Talk about shock! Without debating the appropriateness of the volume of the rampant texting, I get particularly riled when parents are stuck with huge bills; I hear about this all the time because I work for the consumer advocacy website http://www.fixmycellbill.com, powered by a company called Validas, where we slash the average cell bill by 22 percent. People like the Christoffersons may not have been actively misled by their providers, but they were clearly unaware of the vulnerability of their cell plans to their kids’ texting habits. I could go on and on about how shifty these cell companies can be in their attempts to make you overpay. I'll mention that at Validas, we stop them and have currently put over $5,000,000 back in the pockets of consumers. You can check out Validas’s fixmycellbill.com in the national news media, most recently on Good Morning America at http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6887412&….
Good luck to everyone trying to cut your wireless expenses in this rough economy.
Dylan